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Corsair raptor k40 keyboard and m45 mouse are designed to provide

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best-in-class features and performance for gaming click now to learn more

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valve in-home streaming uses the power and compatibility of a Windows-based

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gaming pc somewhere in the house to enable a great

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gaming experience on other devices and operating systems basically anything

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that can run the steam client Windows os x or Linux can use it as long as the

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hardware is powerful enough it works on inexpensive desktop pcs notebook pcs or

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even tablets so what does it do first of

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all it's in beta so all of this is subject to change but the basics should

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be pretty much set at this point so here you go in home streaming uses your

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gaming machine with a powerful graphics card for example your office or your man

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cave rig to act as the server and to run

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a demanding game then with as little latency as possible convert that to an

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h.264 compressed video stream it then sends that video stream over your home

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network to another machine for example your home theater pc that's hooked up to

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your tv which acts as a client that can

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without working very hard decode that video stream and display it on the

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screen at the same time the client pc

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takes input commands from your game controller or keyboard and mouse and

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again latency is key here sends them back to the server to actually control

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the game the idea is that any pc with

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adequate network performance and CPU horsepower can let you play your games

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the games on your gaming rig remotely so what does it not do it does not allow

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streaming over the internet although i suspect workarounds for that won't be

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much of a stretch for the technically inclined it does not allow multiple

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people to use the server or streaming machine at the same time so your office

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gaming pc can't have someone sitting at it working on spreadsheets while you're

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using the horsepower of that GPU to game downstairs it will actually be running

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the game on screen at the same time just like NVIDIA's game stream technology

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number three it does not allow logging in from multiple locations on the same

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network to the same account and playing different games at the same time we'll

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need steam family sharing for that which is hopefully coming soon number four it

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does not allow higher resolutions than the connected monitor of the server pc

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the game must run on both pcs at the same time so if your desktop computer

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has a 720p monitor and your tv downstairs is 1080p then your stream

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will be limited to 720p the good news is

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that the opposite is not true so as long as your gaming pc has the same or higher

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resolution as the other pc your remote pc can scale that image down

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appropriately number five is it's a little bit finicky right now and it does

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not have perfect game compatibility in the future i'd expect this to be much

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improved and you should be able to stream most of the games in your steam

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library even the ones that you've added manually number six

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it does not deliver the greatest image quality it's seemingly capped at about

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30 megabits per second maximum streaming bit rate so that means color depth will

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be lower which is perceived as blockiness and what would otherwise be

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smooth color transitions and it also introduces artifacts some that are

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difficult to notice and some that are very very easy to notice such as these

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around a crosshair in battlefield bad company 2. moving on to hardware

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requirements valve has been pretty tight-lipped about these probably

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because this functionality just went into beta and they are still working on

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it but there are a few things that we know CPU performance will have to be

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enough to decode and play back an h.264 video stream at whatever frame rate and

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resolution you're running officially valve supports 720p and 1080p at either

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30 or 60 FPS network performance also matters but how

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many megabits or gigabits per second it can achieve is not actually the most

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important thing connection latency and reliability are much more critical than

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throughput a theoretically faster n or

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even ac wireless connection will inherently drop more frames than a

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normal Ethernet or even a slow power line network connection because hardline

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networking performance is much less susceptible to interference speaking of

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interference forget about 2.4 gigahertz and wireless even if the throughput is

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fast enough there's so much interference on that frequency that 720 30 FPS isn't

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a great experience five gigahertz wireless n was much better in my testing

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but that's a subject for another video stay tuned for a follow-up where we take

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a closer look at network requirements the other requirement is the pc actually

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doing the gaming has to be powerful enough to run those games that's kind of

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a given all of this aside so we don't really know exactly what we need if you

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are trying in home streaming and you're wondering how your configuration is doing pressing f6 on the client pc

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provides a somewhat useful little analysis bar that drop pops up and tells

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you latency drop frames and stuff like that i didn't always find that the

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numbers correlated directly to the gaming experience i was having though so

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your mileage may vary but at least it's in there so let's move on to the

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practical demonstrations obviously if you have two powerful gaming rigs you

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could stream between them but gaming locally would usually make more sense in

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this case so i'm gonna focus on some demos for you guys that show how i think

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this technology will be used here's demo number one i'm using a Linux in this

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case steam os machine to run a game that doesn't natively run on Linux

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boom your entire Windows game library now runs on a modestly powerful Linux

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box no excuse not to try it now hey in this case this is batman arkham origins

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running at 1080p 60fps and here's demo

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number two this old low-cost low-power

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sapphire machine has an AMD e450 dual core apu with

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integrated graphics in spite of its age and lackluster performance i can have a

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console grade gaming experience that is to say 720p 30fps with no frame loss

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while playing the latest games in this case i've got battlefield bad company 2

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running here but that was just for the sake of you know mixing up our games a little

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bit here's demo number three this is a thin and light notebook with integrated

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Intel graphics and i love thin and lights they're portable there's this one

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there's this one this one can work as a notebook or a tablet it's super lightweight but like

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many people i had to make the decision between portability

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and gaming performance not anymore here it is running bioshock infinite at 1080p

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30fps this is wirelessly and the experience isn't perfect but if you have

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a usb to Ethernet adapter even this one right here a dual core ultrabook was

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able to stream at 1080p 60fps

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very very impressive now we're getting

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into experimental territory demo number four is ifinity three by 1080p it didn't

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work with lots of games and it was more of an exercise in

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pushing the limits rather than trying to deliver a great gaming experience but it

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worked it's not fantastic latency feels

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noticeably higher and the frame rate especially when moving around

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consistently can't go above about 20 FPS

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which is interesting because we're at three times the resolution of 1080p so

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being only able to achieve 20 FPS or one third of 60fps the maximum allowable

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value in the valve settings looks like it may be an artificially imposed

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limitation one that valve could unlock in the future by giving us higher bit

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rates for higher resolution streaming

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the grand finale our most elaborate test setup yet we have two

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4k tvs one with our Radeon r9 290x

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gaming machine and the other with my pretty run-of-the-mill i mean it's a gtx

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670 so it's pretty decent but this is with my steam machine you can see

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they're connected ncix was generous enough to let us come and tear apart two

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stores to get access to these two 4k tvs run Ethernet cables between two

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neighboring stores but we are pretty much ready to find out if this is going

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to work so we are setting we are limiting our resolution to the desktop

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resolution which happens to be 3820

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by 2160 so that's 4k which obviously

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isn't a setting that we can actually you know

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set here so we're going to set our bandwidth to unlimited our frame rate to

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automatic and we're going to find out if this works i've been working on this for

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about an hour and a half we're trying to get this set up so let's fire up portal

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2 and see if it flies

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not defeated yet but we discovered an issue and that is that the NVIDIA

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graphics card in here with the Linux drivers that it has to run because this

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is running steam os does not support a 4k output over HDMI

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yet so we switched to a Windows machine we tried to use mini displayport to

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active dual link hd or dvi to HDMI and

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it showed up as a selection in the resolution options but then the tv spat

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that out so conveniently we're at ncix and we have another notebook sitting

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right here and we are now installing steam we're running at 4k on that one so

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we're gonna find out if this is actually going to work very shortly it's working

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i actually we uh we shot in the dark

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we went and fired up batman and it's working capturing 3840 by 2160

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at around 20 oh my goodness it just dipped down to 14 frames per second now

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something i'm a little bit concerned about is the link utilization here it's

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telling me 21 of estimated and it's not going above 100 megabit per second so

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i'm wondering if we might have a slower than gigabit connection for some reason

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if we might have a bad Ethernet cable or something like that but i'm going to go

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ahead and confirm these changes and we are definitely running at 4k

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resolution now the the bit rate is not

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really enough to sustain it properly

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you can tell it's quite blocky but in terms of sheer resolution

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it's running so there you have it guys

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batman arkham origins running in 4k

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over the network using steam in-home streaming is it a perfect experience

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absolutely not it's leggy as all balls right now

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and uh the the low bit rate so it's about 32

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megabit even when we're maxing everything out we're running at 4k it

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makes it look not nearly as good as if you're actually sitting right in front

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of it but the fact that it works at all

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just shows such promise for this technology in the future and when you

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consider as well how functional the 1080p version is and how low latency

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that is and how we're going to see better network connections and faster

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processors on either side in the future i think it is just so exciting and

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there's so much promise for this technology so thanks guys for checking

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out our steam in-home streaming video don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech

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tips for unboxings reviews and other computer videos and thanks again to ncix

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for letting us come in here and borrow their two 4k tvs to try this out

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you